The maintenance of feudal relations between classes, when neither government nor society rested on the same bases as in feudal times, could only be productive of harm. In right of birth privileges and advantages were claimed by nobles without regard to principles of justice or of public utility. On every side, in the army, the navy, the profession of the law, distinction between the nobleman and the bourgeois still prevailed. But no institution suffered in consequence of the privileges of the nobility so great moral detriment as the Church. The Church was a rich, self-governed corporation, in possession of an annual revenue of more than 8,750,000_l._, providing for about 130,000 persons, including monks and nuns. This great wealth was unfairly distributed, and to a large extent misapplied. As a rule, all higher posts were reserved for portionless daughters and younger sons of noble families. Bishops and abbots, who revelled in wealth, were nobles; parish priests, who had barely enough for subsistence, were bourgeois and peasants. Thus the Church teemed with abuses, and exerted little moral influence. Her wealth excited the jealousy of the middle classes, whilst the luxurious and profligate lives led by many prelates and holders of sinecures brought disgrace on the ecclesiastical profession. Of reform there was no hope, since the lower clergy, who had interest in effecting it, were excluded from all part in Church government. ♦Government and administration.♦ Such abuses called aloud for the hand of a reformer. The material result of social disorder was impoverishment and decay. ‘Whenever you stumble on a grand seigneur,’ wrote an English traveller, ‘you are sure to find his property a desert.... Go to his residence, wherever it may be, and you will probably find it in the midst of a forest very well peopled with deer, wild boars, and wolves. Oh! if I were the legislator of France for a day, I would make such great lords skip.’ The king had acquired power in right of the services he rendered the nation. When he ceased to do good, as had been the case since Louis XIV. plunged the nation into a series of wars of ambition, it was inevitable that he should do harm. The welfare of the masses was dependent on the action of the central government, and the central government sacrificed their welfare for the sake of obtaining favour with the upper classes. Hence administration was in a chaos, and the government, in appearance all powerful, was in reality strong only when it had to deal with the crushed and helpless peasant and artisan. The States-General, which in some sort answered to our English Parliament, had last met in 1614. For the past two centuries the royal council had been engaged in undermining local liberties, and establishing a centralised system of administration. The work in all essentials was so thoroughly done, that no parish business, down to the raising of a rate or the repairing